Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy is being staged at the sites of the battles of
the Wars of the Roses. Dominic Cavendish feels the closeness of the
horror that inspired the plays.

What does it add to present Shakespeare’s blood-soaked Henry VI trilogy on the battle-field sites where some of the most important military encounters of the Wars of the Roses took place? Over the coming month, Shakespeare’s Globe isn’t just touring this epic cycle to air-conditioned regional playhouses – as well as its own part-sheltered backyard – but boldly bringing the plays to life out in the open, within arrow-shot and sword-lunge of four of the settings visited in the slaughter-filled saga.

This logistically demanding theatrical pilgrimage began on Sunday at Towton, near York – scene of the biggest and most deadly of the confrontations between Yorkists and Lancastrians, which left a reported 28,000 men slain on Palm Sunday, 1461, and saw such a rout of those defending Henry that the king was forced to flee to France. In August, the whole thing will be presented again – in one exhaustive sequence spanning the best part of 10 hours, despite much in the way of textual pruning – near the former killing fields of St Albans (1461), Tewkesbury (1471) and Barnet (1471). I have to confess that I won’t be putting myself through such a sedentary marathon for quite a while – even with the benefit of a fold-up chair I felt like walking wounded by the end of the evening. But I’m heartily glad, nay feel thoroughly privileged, that I did and I’m full of admiration for a cast of just 14, directed by Nick Bagnall, that sweats its collective guts out in quasi-period costume to entertain, inform and inspire on such a grand scale.

The added element of geographical connection clarifies what happened and where – a big challenge with the Histories as events hurtle past in a whirl of vying noblemen. And without getting falsely sentimental, it’s quite a pole-axeing thing to realise that the field you’re in and surrounding tranquil farmland, was, that snowy day 550-odd years ago, a landscape of barely describable horror.

Shakespeare, of course, does his level-best to describe that horror. You could argue that Towton is one of the birthplaces of his dramatic imagination. For in these early works, it’s in the Act II soliloquy of Part III – where Henry contemplates “this fell war” from the vantage-point of a molehill – that you sense the playwright fully beginning to flaunt his powers.

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In reality, hapless Henry was miles away in York while the battle raged, but Shakespeare twists facts to achieve poetic truth. And watching Graham Butler’s sweetly timid king sit upon a modest metal bucket, struggling to fathom the viciousness of man as the setting sun turned crimson and the air chilled, it was as if the elements themselves were granting benediction to this unique project.

Though the company might easily have been able to pitch camp on the unadorned grass, it helps that Ti Green has rustled up a bare-bones set dominated by lattice-like, ladder-lined metal towers, allowing swords to clang against it during the simulated strife, while drums are pounded on either side, as ominous as fear-stirred heartbeats.